LinkedIn as a source of expert advices

I believe that a lot of you are already familiar with LinkedIn, (for those who are not: the easiest way to describe LinkedIn — it is a social network for bussiness contacts). Generally, I wanted to draw your attention to a certain possibility I had noticed during redisign of LinkedIn.

Even though at the first sight, LinkedIn appears to be very static (I would not refer to it as clasical social network like Facebook or MySpace), behind all, there is a good source of expert advices under the name of LinkedIn Answers.

The principle, I suppose, arose from the Yahoo Answers model, a system of ranking and closed/opened questions gives it a handy oversight of useful information and answers. 19 millions of users, mostly experts in certain areas = useful and good answer. Also, you can check the background of the person who answered the question.

Of course, data base of answers is also available. If you lack in inspiration, you can always find an interesting qustion in there…